Various models of pneumatic or vacuum meters and planters have been developed and described in patents, and among these, in particular, is the classic “Vacuum Seed Meter,” U.S. Pat. No. 5,170,909 from a well-known planter manufacturer. Another example of a successful vacuum meter is described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,888,387 to Deckler, the disclosure of each of which is hereby incorporated herein in its entirety by this reference.
Better singulation of the seeds and/or greater efficiency of the system as a whole is greatly sought after.
Conventional pneumatic seed metering equipment integrates agricultural implements specifically intended for sowing. Such agricultural equipment, known as pneumatic planters, including a seed vacuum meter (5), as shown in FIG. 1, which includes a seed input region, an internal rotary disk that contains orifices responsible for collecting and transporting seeds, a seed singulator made up of one or more objects that repeatedly touch the seeds, singulating those collected by disk's orifices, a debris ejector responsible for removing the debris that may be trapped in the disk's orifices, a sealed region that provides a pressure difference between the two sides of the seed collecting disk, and a region in which the seeds are released and sent out from the meter.
The term “seed singulation,” as used herein, is meant to refer to the task of metering seeds one by one, without misses or double seeds.
The constructive arrangement of such elements in meters, such as that disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,170,909, although effective, presents a great limitation; that is, the need to manually adjust the seed singulator for each type of crop and seed size to be dosed by the meter. This manual adjustment lets the singulator to be adjusted incorrectly, causing the quality of the seed singling-out process to be compromised.
The meter described in Patent Publication No. US2015/0305229 (incorporated by reference herein) does not feature manual adjustment in the singulator; however, one problem presented by this meter is that the exchange of the meter components is not very practical, as there is a need to change three different parts when the meter is being prepared to dose out a seed crop that is different from the previous crop. Among these pieces, there are small pieces, such as the debris ejector, that may be easily lost when exchanging seed crops.
Following is a simplified summary of embodiments described in this disclosure. This summary is not a general extensive vision of all the embodiments covered herein and is not meant to identify fundamental or critical elements or to delineate the scope of such embodiments. Its sole purpose is to present some concepts of the embodiments described in a simplified way, serving as an introduction to the more detailed description that will be hereinafter presented.
It is important to note that this disclosure, while focusing on pneumatic meters that utilize vacuum sources to dose out seeds, may receive an alternative constructive shape in which the pressure difference between the disk's two sides is obtained by raising the pressure on the disk side on which the seeds are transported.